The Chance You Won't Return Read online

  Theresa ignored him. She grasped the driver’s headrest and hoisted herself forward, her chin practically on Edward’s shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Kane. Alex gets to drive today, right?”

  Mr. Kane was telling Edward to put away the phone already and pay attention. Today was three-point-turn day. “Now you’re at a dead end. Visualize the street,” he said once Edward’s path was blocked by a line of orange cones. “What are you going to do?” Edward didn’t hesitate, possibly inspired by Mr. Kane’s voice. When he wasn’t teaching driver’s ed, Mr. Kane was also the theater teacher, coaching drama queens through the chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset” with his powerful tenor. Apparently he’d played various understudies on Broadway a decade ago but had to give it up because of his mother’s heart disease. She was still dying, and he was directing Oliver! this spring.

  “Very good, Edward,” he said as Edward checked his rearview mirror and eased the car into reverse. Smiling into his clipboard, Mr. Kane was probably complimenting himself on using theater techniques in driver’s ed.

  “Yeah, you’re a regular car god,” Theresa muttered at the back of Edward’s head. “When is Alex going to drive?”

  Mr. Kane sighed. “After Edward’s done, it’s Alex’s turn.”

  “I don’t have to. Edward needs more practice,” I said.

  “Edward’s a champion,” Theresa said. “You can be one, too.”

  “I can drive if Alex doesn’t want to,” Caroline said, her quiet smile directed at me. A small part of me wanted to throw my arms around her and claim her as my new best friend. But mostly I wanted to tie her up and repeatedly run her over with the Volvo. As if I needed her pity.

  “It’s okay — I’ll do it.”

  Edward parked the car neatly by the curb so we could switch places. (Of course it was easy for him to drive; he had two older siblings.) In the front seat, I felt like Alice in Wonderland, shrinking to nothingness. Could I even press the pedals from here? Even after adjusting the seat and mirrors, I didn’t feel like I fit. Which pedal was which again? I remembered smashing into the curb, the sudden bang and hiss of the front right tire exploding. In classrooms, students had leaned toward rows of windows. Dozens of eyes watched as we got out of the car to assess the damage. How could that have happened? I thought driving would be easy, natural. Even the idiot senior boys could drive.

  When I tried to focus on the dashboard, my vision blurred and I couldn’t remember how to count. The veins in my throat throbbed. Maybe if I had an anxiety attack, I would be excused.

  “We’ll start out with something simple,” Mr. Kane promised. “You don’t even have to visualize anything. This is only a parking lot. All you have to do is pull away from the curb and make a left turn up there.”

  I could feel everyone’s fingernails dig into the vinyl.

  My hands groped for the key, already in the ignition, and I yanked it the wrong way a few times before starting the car.

  “What are you doing?” Edward laughed, hyena-like. In the rearview mirror, I could see three fillings in his unnaturally large mouth. His cell phone was pinned to his ear as he told his freshman girlfriend what a spaz I was.

  “Shut the fuck up, Baker,” Theresa snapped.

  Mr. Kane whirled around in his seat, straining against the seat belt. “Hey, settle down back there. And shut the phone off, Edward.” I hoped he would add “or else everyone’s out of the car,” but he didn’t. Instead he looked at me, his forehead suddenly huge and gleaming. “Ease your foot onto the gas and gently turn away from the curb.”

  I’d only seen one of Oak Ridge High School’s plays, last year’s Annie Get Your Gun. It was painful to watch — screeching sopranos and boys with no rhythm doing the box step. Buffalo Bill Cody kept forgetting his lines. Meanwhile, Mr. Kane smiled as he directed the orchestra, hand waving gracefully over the violins. Maybe he was a better actor than director. Right now his teeth were welded together.

  “Come on, Alex. Just like riding a bike,” Theresa said.

  Yeah, I thought. I’ve done that before. I placed my foot on the gas, applied the smallest amount of pressure, and in a second, we were gliding over the asphalt. My hands rested at four and eight. Orange cones passed like troubled thoughts in a clear mind.

  Beside me, Mr. Kane’s breathing steadied. “Very good, Alex,” he said. “Can you picture a road? This is how easy it’ll be.”

  Easy. We were moving and not dying. It was just like riding a bike.

  Except with more numbers and dials. Suddenly I was imagining people on bikes getting hit by people in cars. Accidents like that happened all the time — screeching tires, mangled arms, heads cracking against pavement. Cars didn’t even have to be going very fast to kill someone; we learned that in the written classes.

  “Be careful,” Edward grumbled. “I think we hit five miles an hour.”

  My arms felt heavy and rubbery, like they were filling with water. The windows were all up, all manual. I wanted to ask everyone to roll theirs down, but the words shriveled in my throat. Somehow it had gotten overcast since I started driving. Clouds pressed against the windshield.

  Mr. Kane was making swift checkmarks on his clipboard. “Now you’re going to turn the corner there. Watch out for the corner. The left.”

  “Alex, the left,” Theresa said.

  I yanked the wheel toward the left. My arms were so heavy, I couldn’t correct myself. Then my knees were locked and I couldn’t take my foot off the gas.

  “Wrong side of the road,” Mr. Kane said. He reached for the steering wheel, but it was too late. We careened through the cones, over the curb, and, barely missing the goalpost, onto the trimmed lawn of the football field. Everyone in back clasped one another and braced their feet against the front seats. The word “left” was stuck in my brain, so I tried turning again, but by the screams, I could tell that wasn’t the right answer. Mr. Kane kept shouting for me to stop. Finally the word registered and my foot smashed the brake. For a moment, everything was quiet. We were still alive.

  In the rearview mirror, I could see Edward shake his head and chuckle to himself. “Jesus, Alex, you fucking suck.”

  “Out of the car.” Mr. Kane’s voice was choked, as if he’d swallowed a beetle.

  I grasped the door, swung myself out of the Volvo, and walked stiffly on the grass. Let Mr. Kane yell at me; I was just happy to be standing on my own two feet again. Everyone else followed, standing as far away from me as possible, except for Theresa. Mr. Kane turned from us, hands at his hips, clipboard wagging at his side. His breathing was deep but sharp. When he faced us again, his cheeks were flushed and his nostrils flared.

  “Alexandra,” he said through his teeth, stressing the last syllable and turning my name into a kind of wince, “were you visualizing a street?”

  I glanced at Theresa for help, but she was studying her shoes. “Yes,” I lied.

  He had to choose his words carefully. “Visualize that street again for me, won’t you, Alexandra? You have run over everyone on that street, Alexandra. They are all dead.”

  Edward snickered in his fist, while Caroline looked vaguely ill. I imagined it was them I’d run over. Suddenly being the neighborhood assassin didn’t seem so bad.

  Mr. Kane took another deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was clearer, hitting the deeper register of his tenor. “I’m not sure you should be in this class,” he told me. “I think we should call your parents and set up a conference. Maybe we can find an alternative.”

  Because of my dad’s schedule at the post office, it was hard for him to make conferences. Most likely, it would only be my mom. I could see it, the two of them discussing how unfathomable it was that I couldn’t drive. Shamefaced, Mom would assure him that she could parallel park anywhere. My lack of skill must have been from my father’s side of the family. They’d laugh. She would thank Mr. Kane for bringing this to her attention and refuse to let me on the road at all, in order to save the lives of pedestrians across town. Afterward she would drive me
home, asking why I couldn’t do this one simple thing. It would be heinous if my mother came to school. I hoped that if she were at home right now, staring out the window, she would be too distracted to hear the phone ring.

  Of course, by the next morning, everyone had heard that I’d plowed onto the football field. It was a small school — ninety-three juniors, ninety-four now with Jim Wiley — so I wasn’t surprised they all knew. The lawn was choppy near one of the end zones, two straight patches torn from where I had hit the brakes so sharply. Football practice had been limited to one half of the field, so the players’ cleats wouldn’t do any additional damage. The football coach and two groundskeepers were out there, hands on their hips and shaking their heads at the bare dirt.

  “Oh, please,” Theresa said. “It’s just grass.”

  The rest of the student body didn’t seem to think so. Somehow our football team had managed an undefeated season so far — a first for the Oak Ridge Mountaineers. People other than the players’ parents were attending games. Even my school spirit extended so far as to wear a maroon T-shirt on pep rally days (though it was really only so I wouldn’t stand out). People were talking about going to the state finals. According to the rumors, state was out of reach now that I had destroyed the field. Which was totally ridiculous — the field was barely damaged — but they claimed it was a mental thing. Without a perfect end zone, they wouldn’t be able to score. Because obviously that had been their problem all the years the team sucked.

  “Hey, Alex,” a sophomore boy called to me while I was getting books from my locker, “can I get a ride after school?” Before I could think of a clever response, he turned back to his friends, all hooting with amusement.

  “Yeah, laugh your brains out,” I said. I shoved a calc book into my locker so hard, the metal clanged.

  From across the hall, Theresa heard the noise. “I hate math, too,” she said, “but at the end of the year, they make you pay for the books you mess up.” When only half my mouth rose into a smile, she shook her head at the sophomores. “Screw them, seriously. They’ll be smoking pot in their parents’ basements when they’re forty.”

  “Forty needs to hurry along,” I said.

  A group of boys in letterman jackets strolled down the hall, and my stomach knotted. From kindergarten through junior year, I had tried so hard to be inconspicuous, to fly under the radar, and so far it had worked: I certainly wasn’t going to be prom queen, but I had my friends and managed to avoid crippling social trauma. Now everyone seemed to know both my name and that I couldn’t manage a simple task everyone else had mastered.

  One of the senior football players, Nick Gillan, his neck as thick as his skull, smirked at me. “Better start gardening.”

  “Christ, it’ll grow back,” Theresa said.

  “It won’t by Friday.” Nick leaned toward me, so close that I saw the scars from where he’d scratched his acne. “Better get to work, Alex. It’s not going to grow back on its own.”

  I could smell the smoke on his breath under spearmint gum, stale and sugary. Behind him, the other football players chuckled. I swung my locker door shut. “Yeah, like your bald spot? That hair’s never coming back.”

  Nick briefly touched the back of his head, where hair was already starting to thin. His mouth bent into a frown. “Fuck you, Winchester.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Asshole.”

  Mr. Hunter, the vice principal, appeared nearby. “Problem here?”

  “Not with me,” Nick said. Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, he sauntered away, the other football players behind him.

  Mr. Hunter frowned at me. “Watch your language, Miss Winchester.” Then he walked down the hall, limbs swinging in a poor imitation of the strut in old cowboy movies.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

  Theresa shrugged. “He probably has money on the game.”

  I hadn’t known how bad things would be if the football team’s winning streak was threatened. For years, they’d suffered humiliating defeats, ranked as the worst team in their league. And suddenly, after winning a few games, I was the one responsible for jeopardizing their chances of going to state. All day everyone kept harping on it, either as a joke or taking it seriously. People claimed I had hurt the team’s focus, or that the cheerleaders had better watch out when I was behind the wheel, or that I was a plant from our rival schools, out to kill the quarterback. When I was calm, I could say their behavior was immature and irrational, and they’d be lucky if they passed geometry or managed not to knock up their girlfriends. But by the time I followed Theresa into the cafeteria and heard my name at various tables, the calm had burned out of me.

  Even when kids didn’t call out or approach me, I could feel eyes turn whenever I entered a room. At one table, girls from the soccer team pretended they’d been looking elsewhere when I turned to them. Last year when I was on JV, we’d all been friends. I quit when I finally got sick of my mom lecturing me after games about what I could have done better. Now I wished I’d stayed on the team just so they might stick up for me. I would have made varsity this year. In sophomore English, we read The Scarlet Letter, and although I hadn’t liked it at the time, now I felt like Hester Prynne was my kind of girl.

  Theresa and I sat in the corner, joining our friends Maddie and Josh. I’d been friends with Maddie since elementary school, when we were both into horses, and Josh since middle school, when we both were into hating math class. They’d been talking about some band coming to Richmond, but stopped once Theresa and I sat down. I was sure they’d say something about my driving, but instead Josh asked, “You know Jim Wiley?”

  All three of them looked at me. “Yeah,” I said. “Everybody knows Jim. He drove into his house, remember?”

  “No, I mean,” Josh said, “like, are you friends?”

  I balanced an apple in my palm before taking a bite. “Not really. I mean, I saw him on the way to school yesterday.”

  “What’d you do?” Theresa asked, grinning. “Hook up in the woods?”

  “Yeah, it was really romantic,” I said. “Bugs and wet leaves. I’m super outdoorsy.” My mind flashed to Jim’s perfect mouth and how I bet he would be an amazing kisser. “If Jim Wiley wanted to hook up in the woods, that’s what I’d be doing right now.”

  “Like Tarzan and Jane,” Maddie said. She took out a pen and started drawing purple flowers on her hands. “Except fewer gorillas, more squirrels.”

  I looked at Josh. “Did Jim say we were friends?”

  Josh explained that he had been in Spanish class when people started talking about me, the car, and the football field. And then Jim said, “Like you guys are any better.” I thought that was surprising enough, but Josh went on to describe Nick Gillan arguing with Jim about me, Nick saying I was some dumb bitch and they were going to lose the game because of me. “So Jim goes, ‘Whatever. You sucked to begin with.’ Nick’s face got all red and he tried to jump out of his desk, which didn’t really work because he’s too big. Jim was, like, staring him down. I totally thought Nick was going to flip desks over or something, but then Señor Oria came in, so everyone had to shut up and sit down.”

  Maddie nodded. “Jim Wiley totally stood up for you.”

  I chewed a bite of apple and tried not to smile. “Yeah, well, he demolished part of his house. He probably thinks messing up the football field is so minor compared to that.”

  A few tables away, Jim Wiley was sitting with his senior friends but didn’t seem to be saying much. He hadn’t been in school long enough after driving into his parents’ house to deal with any of the rumors. Some people had claimed he drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Others said he hated his family, and another group insisted that he snorted coke with the lacrosse team in the boys’ bathroom. Whatever he’d done, it was cooler than freaking out behind the wheel.

  I swallowed a bite of sandwich, but it was hard in my throat. I barely knew Jim; the first time he’d said more than “hey” to me had been tha
t morning in the woods. Except now he was sticking up for me when most of the student body thought I was an idiot. I hoped the rumors about him weren’t true. I hoped he was mostly an okay person. That suddenly seemed important.

  Just after last bell, Mr. Kane caught me in the hall. I thought he was going to tell me about more imaginary people I’d killed, but he’d calmed down a little since driver’s ed. “Alex,” he said, exhaling heavily. It was as if he’d been practicing how to say my name without swearing.

  “Mr. Kane,” I said.

  “I just spoke with your mother about your situation. Your parents and I are going to have a conference and discuss our options. I really don’t want to fail you, so be prepared — it’s probably going to have to be a lot of extra work.”

  I could already imagine the lecture — how I wasn’t applying myself, how I was totally capable, and how I had to get over it already. “What did my mom say?” I asked.

  “She’s concerned, obviously,” he said. He paused, frowning at his clipboard, and then met my gaze. His voice was softer. “She said she’d been feeling a little out of sorts, so please let her know that I can work around her schedule if she’s under the weather.”

  “Right,” I said, remembering how my mother had glazed over at breakfast. It was nothing, I told myself. Not like when she’d been sick — or that’s what we called it — years earlier. “She’s fine. You can meet whenever.”

  “Excellent. Until then, you can observe.”

  I tried to smile. Observing driver’s ed — such a thrill. Public humiliation aside, I wondered if it would be better to fail the class.

  “We’ll make a driver out of you yet,” Mr. Kane said.

  “Can’t wait,” I said.

  Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.